Tuesday August 31, 2004: 7-8:15pm Pacific Time - "features
Jeff Krukin, advocate of the importance of space to human
survival and prosperity, and our connection to space in numerous
ways, i.e. "Human-Space Connection. (tm)" This covers the
spectrum from spiritual to scientific to environmental to
commercial.

Now posted in the archive are recent interviews with Gene
Meyers, Founder and CEO of The Space Island Group, Inc,
with Dr.
John Brandenburg who is a Mars scientist, researcher in
various forms of propulsion, and science fiction author aka
Victor Norgarde, and with Jim
McDade who is a long time space advocate, activists, and
publisher of Space
ADG newsletter.

NASA - always losing its mind... While
some
say that the NASA culture is gradually overcoming its faults,
the agency's memory continues to fail badly. Take, for example,
the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond,
also known via its chairman's name as the Aldridge Commission.

The commission had hearings over several months that included
testimonies from a broad range of space advocates, entrepreneurs,
scientists, analysts, and others with interesting point of view
on the future of US space policy. One doesn't have to be an
Internet pack rat to realize the educational and historical
value of the transcripts and videos from these hearings that
were available on the commission's web site.

This is hardly an unusual occurrence. Frequently, NASA web
pages, and even vast web sites devoted to particular projects
like the X-33, just disappear without a trace from the NASA.gov
domain. (Usually there is no forwarding address provided even
when a page has simply been moved to a different location. Innumerable
bookmarks around the world are spoiled everyday by NASA.)

While some fraction of the resources of the NASA's disappeared
web resources can be found in third-party archives like the
CyberCementary
and the Wayback
Machine, some significant information is lost to public
access. The agency has never explained why it doesn't provide
a complete online archive on its own.

As someone who has for years tried to post and maintain links
to a sampling of the vast amount of NASA web resources, I can
tell you that nothing is more exasperating than the way the
agency cavalierly breaks those links. To me this represents
the breaking of an implicit promise by a government agency to
preserve, protect, and publish the results of its expenditures
of the public's money.

Even if a project like the X-33 is a failure, there is no excuse
for blanking it out from the agency's web publications. Much
can be learned from mistakes as well as successes.

This problem goes beyond just web sites. Constance
Adams, the space architect, lamented in an article
in Popular Science a general Knowledge Capture failure
by the agency. For example, when starting to work on development
of a module for the ISS, she had great difficulty locating technical
information about the agency's first space station - Skylab.
Her group came to rely heavily on a cadre of retired NASA engineers
who provided crucial advice and data from their own personal
archives and memories.

She points out that this kind of human data resource is also
cavalierly discarded by the agency. Teams that have accumulated
hundreds of person-years of work in a particular area are broken
up without any systematic effort to collect and retain all of
the experience and knowledge gained. These will all have to
be re-accumulated again when some future project returns to
that area.

While the agency works on its cultural shortcomings, it should
also seek a cure for its long term memory problems.

Tourism - where the real money is
... I occasionally here people scoff at the notion
that tourism will provide the sort of serious market that commercial
space needs for its development. There's the notion that tourism
is a trivial service and instead what space commerce needs to
produce is some sort of tangible commodity (e.g. He3 from the
Moon or platinum from asteroids) or a product like solar power.

In fact, tourism is the single biggest industry on earth and
one of the largest employers. World tourism expenditures are
estimated to be over 500 billion dollars (Plunkett
Research - Travel/Tourism Industry * Tourist
Stats) If private space tourism in twenty or thirty years
can grow to the size of just one of the large Caribbean cruise
lines, it will be a huge success and easily create the framework
for large scale space settlement....

The 7th
International Mars Society convention has been a smashing
success. Held at the historic Palmer House Hilton, Chicago,
IL from August 19-22, the convention gathered 400 leading
space scientists, engineers, government officials, entrepreneurs,
activists, authors, and artists from many countries, including
the USA, Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Britain, Ireland, Spain,
France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Poland, Japan, China, India,
and Australia to discuss ways and means of advancing the exploration
and settlement. Over 120 papers were presented, and over $50,000
was raised to further the work of the Mars Society. The conference
received prominent coverage in many important Chicago area
media, including The Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times,
the Journal-Herald, NPR Radio, and Fox TV News.

Among the highlights of the convention were the opening plenary
by Mars Society President Robert Zubrin, who explained how
a coherent joint Moon-Mars system development could enable
the exploration of both bodies at much lower cost and risk,
and shorter schedule than the wasteful "first Moon, then Mars"
approach being pushed on NASA by certain quarters. Zubrin's
presentation was followed by Dr. Steven Squyres, the Principal
Investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover mission, which
has discovered conclusive evidence for existence of large
standing bodies of water for long durations of Mars' early
history, habitable environments in which life could have once
evolved. Squyres made it clear that he believed that human
exploration was a necessary follow-up to the robotic exploration
of Mars. This prompted one reporter to observe: "There are
all these characters who say that Mars can be explored just
with robots. But the guy who is actually exploring Mars with
robots says we need to send people. That says it all."

Squyres was followed by Admiral Craig Steidle, NASA Associate
Administrator for Exploration Systems, who is leading the
space agencies efforts to return humans to the Moon and proceed
onward to Mars. Steidle explained his plan for "spiral development"
of the necessary systems for human exploration, and emphasized
that he hoped to work closely with the Mars Society in moving
the program forward. Steidle reemphasized this latter point
in a comment which appeared in the Sunday Chicago Tribune
August 22, in which he said; "Societies like the Mars Society
are extremely important to us. They have an innovative and
thorough process. We hope to continue the journey together."

Other exciting plenary talks included Dr. Mike Lembeck, who
serves as Steidle division chief for requirements development,
who explained how his group is laying out the roadmap for
technology development to open the solar system; Dr. Bill
Clancey, the head of human centered computing at NASA Ames
Research Center, who presented a talk and video showing research
his group has done at the Mars Society's Mars Desert Research
Station investigating techniques for combined human-robot
exploration on Mars; Dr. Stan Borowski, of the NASA Glenn
Research Center, and the space agency's top expert on nuclear
thermal rocket (NTR) propulsion, who explained how NTR technology
could enable accelerated cost-effective
exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond; Dr. Chris McKay,
of NASA Ames Research Center, who explained the central significance
of the search for life on Mars to resolving the question of
the diversity and prevalence of life in the universe; Eric
Anderson; President and CEO of Space Adventures Ltd., who
explained how space tourism could potentially open a market
that would establish the economic basis for commercially financed
space settlement; Dr. Fred Pohl, a Grandmaster of science
fiction (author of many award winning works, including "The
Space Merchants") who presented a science fiction visionary's
view of "When will humankind become a spacefaring species."
Dr. Scott Horowitz; and astronaut and Shuttle commander, who
piloted the second Hubble repair mission, who presented an
astronaut's view of human Mars exploration.

A major sensation was caused at the
convention by the announcement by award-winning filmmaker
Sam Burbank that he would be making a theatrical motion picture
based on Robert Zubrin's novel "First Landing." Listing the
various Hollywood horror pictures or shoot-em- ups nominally
featuring Mars, Burbank drew a sharp distinction between those
efforts and the kind of movie "First Landing" will be. "There
never has been a movie actually about the human exploration
of Mars. This will be the first." Burbank said, adding: "It
will not be set in the glorious science fiction future, but
in our own time, and it will show the mission done with all
the grungy realism of the kind of space travel we can really
do. It's not going to show the Mars mission as being easy.
It's not going to show it as being impossible. It's going
to show it as being really tough, but doable, by a group of
people who have what it takes to do it."

If the heavy applause Burbank received wasn't sufficient indication
of the audience's appreciation of his project, what happened
next certainly was, as following his remarks, paperback copies
of "First Landing" were bought up literally by the dozens
by conference members mobbing the book table.

Another highlight of the conference was the showing of advance
clips of James Cameron's upcoming 3-D IMAX film "Aliens of
the Deep." The footage for this movie was taken by Cameron
and his team operating in a flotilla of submarines operating
in conjunction with mobile telerobots to explore extremophile
lie forms living around hydrothermal vents 3000 ft below the
Atlantic. Cameron was going to show the movie to the conference
himself, but a last minute emergency called him away. However
in his place he sent his co-producer and fellow underwater
explorer Steve Quayle, who presented the film to the conference.
The film was quite literally incredible, with the explorers
discovering at every turn weird creatures that exceed the
imagination of Hollywood special effects artists. The movie
will appear in IMAX theaters starting in January 2005, and
we give it eight hundred thumbs up. No one should miss this
film. There never, ever, has been anything like it.

There is so much that could be said,
and not all can. But one thing that cannot escape mention
is the joy and excitement brought to the convention by the
space song contest. This contest, formally known as the Second
Rouget De Lisle space song competition (so named after the
musical genius who wrote "La Marseillaise," and thus gave
the French Revolution its rousing anthem) was conducted over
the past year, during which over 100 songs celebrating human
space exploration were submitted. These were downselected
to 20 finalists who sang off in public competition on the
evening of Friday August 20. the audience of Mars Society
members voted for the top six, who then sang in final competition
at the Saturday night banquet. These songs were outstanding,
and it was hard to judge between them. But for the record,
the winners are:

All 20 of the finalists have been forwarded to Prometheus
Music (producers of the highly successful "To
Touch the Stars" CD which featured selections from the
previous Rouget de Lisle" song contest) for possible inclusion
in its next release.

Songs from the first Rouget de Lisle contest have been posted
and are available for downloading at the "Mars Songs" link
at www.marssociety.org.

By popular demand, there will be a Third Roget de Lisle competition
for songs celebrating the human exploration of space next
year.

Next year's Mars Society convention will be held next August
at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The conference plenary
hall there is known as the Glen Miller ballroom, after the
famous musician and CU graduate, who was lost over the English
channel while traveling to lift the spirits of the troops
trying to break out of the Normandy beachhead during June
1944. It's fitting that his ballroom should host the meeting
of those seeking to break humanity out of its planetary beachhead.
And this time the musicians to rouse their spirits will be
there too.

Tuesday August 24, 2004: 7-8:15pm Pacific Time - "features
Dr. John Brandenburg, Mars scientist, science fiction author
aka Victor Norgarde and author of “Morningstar Pass: The Collapse
of the UFO Cover-up.” Dr. John Brandenburg is a researcher
at Florida Space Institute having come from The Aerospace
Corporation, where one of his duties was as principle investigator
of the MET (Microwave Electro-Thermal) propulsion project.
He also performed an architecture study for a Human Mars Mission
using solar electric propulsion...."

Sunday August 29, 2004: 12:00-1:30pm Pacific TIme - the Space
Show guest "features returning Space Show guest Gene
Meyers, Founder & CEO of The Space Island Group, Inc. Gene
Meyers has worked as an industrial engineer and division manager
for 25 years, most recently TRW. He has written more than
100 articles on space commercialization, and has discussed
the topic on some 200 radio talk shows and a dozen television
news outlets. Meyers founded The Space Island Group, Inc.
in 1999 as a for-profit company with the goal of privately
financing the design, launch and construction of very large,
commercial space facilities in orbit..."

Barnaby says he is trying to get Romanenko, who lives in Star
City near Moscow, to come to London to record the songs but
they haven't yet managed to arrange his trip.

Nevertheless, the album is in production with background vocals
being recorded by members of Venus Ray. If Romanenko doesn't
provide the lead they will either use another singer or do the
songsin instrumental form. "I'm still very excited about
the project, and intend to produce a genuinely good record,
not just a gimmick. I also have (less advanced) plans for a
stage show based on the songs."

He says the album "will come out on Negative
Records in the UK, but we will be seeking licensing deals
for other countries."

Tuesday August 17, 2004: 7-8:15pm Pacific Time - "features
Humboldt C. Mandell, Jr., Ph.D. Dr. Mandell is currently the
senior Research Fellow at The University of Texas at Austin
Center for Space Research and the principal investigator for
Mars Deep Drill project. He recently retired after 40 years
with the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, where
his most recent duties were developing plans for a human expedition
to the planet Mars...."

Sunday, August 22, 2004, 6:00-7:30pm Pacific Time - "features
returning Space Show guest, Jim McDade. Mr. McDade has his
MIS degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham and
is a long time space advocate, activists, and publisher of
Space ADG newsletter. He has written numerous articles and
commentaries about space exploration for the Birmingham News
, InsideKSC, TV, radio and other publications over the past
several decades. He is a former Contributing Editor for the
Space.Com Astronomy reporters network, Mr. McDade has been
a radio reporter and TV reporter/producer for a state public
television network in the late-1970s...."

... One reason it's great
to have a space station if you are interested in long term,
large scale settlement of space is to learn about the various
practical things that you don't know about until you are actually
in space working everyday and getting surprised when things
don't behave as expected: Soldering
Surprise - Science@NASA - Aug.16.04...

Japanese space love story...
The following Japanese TV program recently began on the USN
network, which is carried by some cable systems in the US (item
via HS reader Jay K.):

New Drama Series
"Loved to love" starts on August 6th at 8:30pm!

Two souls that were destined to meet and fall in love. What
happens if one of them leaves this world before even meeting
the other?

Akiyama (Kenji Sakaguchi) is an elite pilot who trained at
NASA, and now enrolled to be a pilot of Japan's first manned
space shuttle launch. Reiko (Hitomi Kuroki) is a director
at an investment bank that sponsors this space shuttle project.
They got the looks, intelligence and wealth. But there is
one thing they don't have... which is truly love and to be
truly loved. Akiyama and Reiko were destined to meet and to
be fall in love.

This captivating romantic love story starts on August 6th!

[The US broadcast in Japanese with English subtitles.]

August.15.2004Space News

Apollo computer emulation... Check
out the Virtual
AGC - Apollo Guidance Computer Emulation progam developed
by Ronald Burkey. The Virtual AGC is a detailed, faithful emulation
of the Apollo guidance computer used in both the Command Module
and on the Lunar Module. Executables are available for Linux
and Windows.

The open source project can allow the AGC code to become a
module in a general Apollo/LM simulation. For example, Mark
Grant is working to incorporate it into the Orbiter
simulator. More Developer
Info.

Britain grounded in science...The
British have long followed the advice of their scientific establishment
and funded no manned programs of any kind. But rather than producing
a bonanza for science, the Sagan rule (i.e., space science funding
tracks manned spaceflight funding) holds true and the entire
British program remains small and anemic: Will
we ever have lift off? Timandra Harkness - spiked-science -
Aug.13.04

Check out also the recent interview
with Ed Wright, who talked about suborbital spaceflight and
his company X
Rocket. A major goal of the company is the development
of the Rocket
Academy where students will train for spaceflight and
will culminate their education with a ride to 60Km on the
Archangel.

Space perception... This
article - Space
and subject classification by Michael Huang - The Space Review
- Aug.9.04 - discusses how the conventional classification
of space as a scientific subject keeps it confined to that area
and makes it difficult to expand consideration of space policies
to a broader range of possibilities. If we instead thought of
space as a "place", then a wild idea like space settlement
becomes much less wild because human settlement is what usually
happens to a "place".

Cool calculation tool...
Here's an innovative program called Frink,
created by Alan Eliasen. At the simplest level it just does
unit conversion but, as these sample
calculations show, it can do an amazing range of calculations
with one or a few lines of code. It "is optimized for doing
quick, off-the-cuff calculations with a minimum of typing".

You can use in with a form
or an applet.
You can also download
and run it as a standalone application and can incorporate it
into other Java programs.

Explore the cosmos from home...
Several times I've discussed the new robotic telescope capabilities
that allow one to carry out observations on major telescopes
via the Internet. (See the Robotic
Telescopes section.) Now SLOOH.com
offers a subscription type program in which you can do observation
with telescopes on the Canary Islands. See the FAQ
and Press articles
for more info.

"Outer space is a province of all mankind," says Sylvia Ospina,
a member of the board of directors at the International
Institute of Space Law. "There is not, and should not
be, any privatization of outer space. It is a common thing
that should belong to all."

This kind of proclamation drives many space advocates to distraction.
Unfortunately, in many academic circles, especially in Europe,
there remains a time warp to the 1960s where all correct thinking
educated people take for granted that private ownership is bad,
government ownership is good.

The fact that you cannot find anywhere on earth a successful
economy without private property rights is irrelevant to their
utopian ideals.

A rational, empirical approach would involve the creation of
a framework of private property rights that requires a physical
presence on the property of interest and the development of
that piece of property. You shouldn't be able to claim the whole
Moon, for example, just because you build a habitat on a small
piece of it.

The details need to be worked out for this kind of homesteading
in space (e.g. would a robotic presence suffice or would human
occupation be required) but I see no reason it couldn't be made
to work.

All of humanity will benefit from the settlement of space and
the creation of a viable economy model. It doesn't subtract
from my wealth, or anyone else's, for example, if someone homesteads
a plot of land in Alaska. Quite the contrary, if that person
successfully develops that property in some way such as by farming
or mining it, we all benefit. The homesteader makes a living
from whatever good or service they derive from that property
and we get a good or service that we desire.

The same economic principles will hold true in space. Economics
is a win-win scenario when done correctly.

Space islands of profitability...
Participants at the recent Return
to the Moon Conference discussed a plethora of ideas about
how to return to the Moon and to build habitats, colonies and
businesses there. Jon Goff sent me a link to his presentation
(460KB powerpoint) in which he discusses "islands of
profitablity" that could finance a process of incremental
commercial development of the systems to reach the Moon and
to settle it.

Criticism of human spaceflight becoming
obsolete... In an article as surprising as a Dog
Bites Man new flash, Prof. James Van Allen wrote yet another
article
recently that criticized human spaceflight, something he has
been doing since the start of the space age. Sam Dinkin gives
a good rebuttal in Human
spaceflight is inevitable - The Space Review - Aug.4.04.

Several months ago I contacted Prof. Van Allen to ask whether
the new generation of manned suborbital vehicles would offer
new possibilities for science. While I knew of his prejudice
against human spaceflight, I hoped he would rise above a knee-jerk
response and make some effort to think objectively about the
possibilities that will come with the availability of frequent
reflights and much lower launch costs. He was one of the first
to do sounding rocket flights in the post W.W.II era and would
certainly have an interesting perspective if he took the time
to think about these new technologies.

Unfortunately, instead of a thoughtful response, he just sent
a brief reflexive rejection of humans on board and made no comments
on these other capabilities:

"I am among the many admirers of Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne
development and consider it an inspiring contribution to aerospace
engineering.

"But I regret to tell you that I am not able to suggest
any example of how a human passenger on a suborbital flight
could perform scientific observations or on-board experiments
that could not be much better performed with automated/commandable
equipment on unmanned rockets. Nor have I learned of any such
credible suggestions by anyone else."

After receiving this message I informed my wife, who does microbiology
research at NIH, that there is no reason she needs to go to
her laboratory anymore since automated equipment can perform
her job much better than she does. (If having a pilot or scientist
on board to monitor and control an experiment is so horrible,
the instruments could be sealed from their flawed interference.)

The public likes to think of scientists as having a Spock-like
dedication to objective, rational, and fair analysis of issues
put before them, even when new information and ideas might show
prior statements to be false. However, that's as fictional as
the planet Vulcan. Scientists are no more or less open minded
than any other group of people and hate to admit they are wrong
just as much as anyone else.

Thankfully, we are entering an era of private human spaceflight
in which funding will come from investors and from the recycling
of profits made from businesses like space tourism. We won't
have to get funding from a government that is easily swayed
by prestigious scientists who bear impressive credentials but
also impenetrable biases.

Tuesday August 3, 2004: 7-8:15pm Pacific Time - "features
returning Space Show guest Robert Zimmerman. Mr. Zimmerman
is an award winning science writer and space historian, and
author of the new best selling book, 'LEAVING EARTH: Space
Stations, Rival Superpower, and the Quest for Interplanetary
Travel.'..."

Sunday, July 18, 2004, 6:00-7:30pm Pacific Time - "features
returning guest Ed Wright, founder of X-Rocket LLC. Ed Wright
of X-Rocket
(Experimental Rocket Racing Organization) first proposed the
rocket racing concept to follow the example set by the airplane
racing events in the pre-WW II era that had a big impact on
advancing aviation technology. Rocket racing events would
consist of suborbital manned rocket vehicles that would compete
in vertical drag races. The company is not a hardware developer,
instead it is a spaceflight services company with the goal
of making commercial human spaceflight safe, routine, and
affordable by offering training and education to industry,
government, and the general public..."